The Residents
by quilter
Summary: Post-Hogwarts. Not entirely canon-compliant. I basically decided to rewrite my previous submission 'Not the Real Bludgers'. I mean for it to be more accessible this time around. No copyright infringement intended. The parts in italics are meant to be what thoughts would be if they ever were effectively coherent.
1. Chapter 1

_Morning. The non-trivial peacefulness. The daylight. The ready-made brightness. An undetectable beginning. Peak grogginess._

Ron Weasley woke up. And he felt the drowsiness of a sunny morning. An essentially marginal feeling because that is how that worked. It was an intentionally bureaucratic process.

He turned onto his side and looked at the photo on the bedstand. The bushy-haired woman in the photo was asleep. But then very slowly she began to wake. She deliciously stretched her arms. Looked up and gave a smile in response to the surprise exposure. A second later, she was asleep again.

He turned onto his back again. Put his arms up and yawned upon an outrageous body stretch which felt really good. He looked up and listened.

Someone else was in the house.

He did not become panicky however. He threw the duvet off to the side. Sat up and put his feet on the floor and his hands to his sides. He was in position. Listened again for another second and tried to put together what the other person was up to. But that did not work well. He reached for his wand, grabbed it and walked out of the room.

Hermione Granger, the woman in the bedstand photo, was in the room in person. It looked as if she was half-through her attempt to give the place a cleanup. And her actions, by the look of it, showed some real competence in view of the difficulty of that initiative. From afar, Ron watched how she went at it remarkably, sizeably quietly and decided to wait till she turned around on her own and not to call on her to tell her he was off the bed. And expectedly it did not take very long for her to catch up.

'Hey' she said.

'Good morning.'

'I did not want to wake you up.'

'You didn't.'

'Good …' she remarked and looked around the large room, 'I decided to put some of your stuff away and clean it up a bit.'

Ron nodded as if to say 'I can see that.'

'Would you like to help?'

In his scotch-coated nazal voice Ron stated, 'Yeah'.

'Someone should do the dishes.'

However Ron made no attempt toward the counter. He just looked at her in a three-headed but nevertheless sweet-natured dog way. This was enough to make Hermione inwardly fidgety. And maybe Ron wanted to shake exactly that implicit reaction from her. It was largely an awkward exercise but he could not help it. He took great care to look for the crazy obscure throw of her head back, for her chin to come forward in the same obscure way only to take its initial position right after, for the close-ends of her eyebrows to go up, and for her lips to come apart as if to draw a wholesome breath. But first she had had to blow the resident carbon out and that was difficult.

The purpose to all this was perhaps to show once more that he did not imagine these particulars in numerous previous cases and, in part, also to give him the chance to be in his skin however apologetic that feeling always was bound to be.

Ron and Hermione were both 34 and they had two kids. But they no longer lived together. Hermione's work had taken her and the kids to Berlin five years ago. However work was not the reason for Hermione to leave England. A time came when they no longer were on each other's side. More to the point, they were not on each other's _corner_ anymore. And that alone can sometimes be enough to make it feel as if the other person is someone up against whom your guard ought never to be down again and not someone to win back over. But, in Ron and Hermione's case, the problem had many dimensions. They were not the kind of people to be just happy to be burnt-outs. They were in an all-together different place. To begin with, they have always been way too protective of each other. And their adult life together just showed how principled a position that has been for both of them. In that respect, the post-war life had given them the chance to really grow up. They no longer needed to take to action; they discovered other ways to care for one another. However growing up in this way also had taken away their hard-headedness. And perhaps this was more difficult for both to deal with. For some reason, it all became too overwhelming. And, to some extent, made it less personal. Overall, a very sad place to be for the two and no better way to explain how sad other than by means of these health-clinic brochure type expressions.

Ron had enough suspense so he walked over to Hermione. And they clumsily kissed. Then he took his position by the kitchen sink. This was the beginning of their summertime back-together week. Every year kids made it out to the Burrow for what may be best described as a summer break and Hermione took a week off to see her friends, family, and Ron before the three of them went back to Berlin. This year however was a little different. Hermione decided her sojourn should be longer on account of how it was to be Rose's, their daughter's, first at Hogwarts. She explained her decision to Ron in a letter that she owled well in advance, however did not hear back from him but then again she had not expected to either. Ron was not a closetted Gildroy Lockhart.

'Did you get my letter?'

'Yes. Maybe it would be better if I first get the books and the work papers out of the way. What do you say?'

Hermione throw a look at Ron's work desk to the far side of the room, the two chairs and an arm chair made into a bed for several parcels of books and the knee-high stacks of paper and journals on the floor. And for a second, she was lost.

'Hermione?'

'Sorry what?' Hermione blurted absent-mindedly.

'Shall I put those away first?'

She looked at the bookshelves and saw that they were already overpopulated as it is.

'No' she said. 'No need.'

'Yes, I did get your letter. But I guess I had expected you to show up at the Burrow. Hence the mass.'

'No. I mean yes.' She looked at Ron. 'I mean … how come?'

'How come what?'

She half-puffed through her nose but mostly as an attempt to find her ground, and was all the more formal-looking when she explained, 'I would not like to impose on you.'

In mock-suprise Ron suggested, 'What? Out of principle?'

'Don't talk to me that way?'

Ron was quick to reclaim, 'How if I put it in a letter?'

She swerved away and as she made her way into the laundry room, she yelled at him, 'Yes. Books first and then dishes.'


	2. The Lunch

Hermione put the laundry into the washer. She then explored through the clutter for some detergent but it looked as if the place was out of it. She did not give up however and tried to force the leftover detergent from otherwise empty-looking bottles into a small cup. Fifteen minutes' hard work provided good results. She now had enough to give it a go.

She looked around. The bathroom had its share of misplaced stuff. She got hold of one of the dirty glasses and gave it an inquisitive sniff. It smelled of brandy. Ron's choices sometimes amazed her. The place had a washer and electricity and other Muggle-made pleasantries, but most of that was due to her wishes from the start. And even then Ron had not really called into question her Muggle hang-ups. Now it looked more as if he no longer tried to be just generously adaptive but found some way to make Muggle tendencies his own.

Whatever it was, it was wrong of anyone to have once imagined that the post-war life had to be uneventful from next day on. A lot has taken place in the meantime and people had been indulgent more than ever, and even expectedly so because the future lost its dark, foreboding quality. Last great peace was upon the wizarding world; Riddle the Pure-Blood Psycho was dead. The end of the war had a more profound meaning for Harry Potter and his gang however. To this day, it was rather hard to suggest a more grim form of solicitousness than his. And Ron and Hermione were particularly closely exposed to that aspect of Harry's personal difficulties. So when the war was over, their sense of blissful consolation was proportionally greater.

_Laughter. Self-serving dopeyness. Love. A promising beginning. Interrogations. Desolate cross-examinations. My very own runway._

Hermione sighed at her own image on the bathroom mirror before she went back to the drawing/sitting room. By the look of it, Ron gave it a real try and the books were off the chairs for a start. But the whole thing looked a scramble. Improvement so far was only tentative. Ron had a cup of tea in his hand, and was at work on a number of bill-like statements. Hermione made a cup of tea for herself too. And sat on one of the kitchen seats in view of Ron. After a couple of nourishing sips from her tea, she took out her wand and charmed the rather stately-looking radio on. It was a Nina Simone song, one of her uncharacteristically happy LPs. 'Here comes the sun, Little Darling' she sang over and over again.

Ron did not react at first but a minute later he slowly began to respond to music's phonetic sweetness. Hermione saw him sip then hum, sip and hum.

Better part of that morning went into making the house a place fit to live in. Perhaps it was a good thing that Ron did not like old, secondhand stuff. A little cleaning was enough to revise the place into its newly renovated shape. Ron definitely had a knack for property-hunting. An innate sense for quality real-estate. For one thing, the real high costs of irrigational slack in an island the size of Britian and in view of the mean rain they had year in and year out did not lead to any advanced discovery in indoor plumbing. But Ron had a very modern perspective on that. Occasional flooding had never made him feel as if he was one of the in-crowd. He was quick to rise above any rot-loving machoism. But finding value property involved many other frustrations, however Ron was decided upon being the most thick-skinned buyer in the market. And things had worked out for them at the end. Even if it was only for a little while.

Now the wash was hang; dishes were clean; the bed was made. And everything was in its proper place. It was already lunch-time, but lunch was complicated. Ron did not have any food in the house. A big downer, he imagined, as he had Hermione over after a year. And especially when she was kind enough to do more than half of his own housework. A feeling of inadequacy was upon him. He did not like that.

'We can go find Rose and Hugo and then have lunch?' he suggested.

'Kids are with Harry and Ginny. I already packed a lunch for us. Molly had made some fried chicken.'

Fried chicken, crisp baguettes, some Camembert and sun-dried tomatoes made for a really good lunch. For Ron, it was hard to be not tempted to stuff his face. But he tried.

After a plateful, he downed his glass of wine. He wiped his mouth. And looked up. Hermione was taking small bites from her second piece of chicken and looking ahead at Ron rather intently. Ron guessed that because she was away for so long that it took awhile for her to take in his festive ways each time she was back. And each time he was a little taken aback by her own small measure of shock.

But today he felt different.

'If you are ready, I can take you to bed' he proposed.


End file.
